Catch the Saint (17 page)

“Then why did he say
his name was Joe?”

“Because Brad Ryner
is a cop. A detective. Figure it out for
yourself.”

Carole pondered, then said:
“I think it would be faster if you explained it to me.”

The muscles of his face
were tense.

“I’m afraid that Brad
Ryner is involved in some kind of under-cover
job, using a phoney name, Joe Something, and I just
walked
in and possibly blew the whole thing for him.”

“You mean he’s
collecting information or something for the
police?”

“Yes, and because I
spilled the beans he may end up collect
ing
bullets in the back.”

“Well,” Carole
said, “I wouldn’t necessarily call it spilling the
beans. Even
if he was infiltrating a gang, or whatever he’s do
ing, how would the crooks know that somebody named Brad
Ryner was a detective?”

“I’m hoping they
won’t,” Simon said. “Ryner had a routine
job in a fairly small
town on the other side of the continent.
There’s
no reason anybody in Philadelphia should ever have
heard his name.”

Carole put a hand on
Simon’s shoulder and smiled.

“Then it wasn’t
quite like walking in and saying, ‘Well, Sher
lock
Holmes, as I live and breathe!’ “

“Not quite,” he
admitted. “But I’m worried that I might
have
done just enough to rouse somebody’s suspicions, and make
them start checking out the name Ryner. Eventually that could mean real
trouble.”

“At least he’s
warned,” she said. “I mean, before anybody
can
find out that Brad Ryner is a cop he can get out of the pic
ture.”

“And that’s my
contribution to law and order,” said the Saint
grimly.

“I’ll bet nobody
thought a thing about it after we went and
sat
down,” Carole asserted. “They’ve forgotten the whole thing
by now.”

“I hope so.”

She sensed his lack of
conviction, but did not pursue it.

“We’re almost there,” she said.
“Would you like to came up
for a
nightcap?”

“I’d enjoy it, but
we’ve had a pretty full evening.” His con
cern
for Brad Ryner showed clearly in his face and his voice. “Maybe another
time.”

“I won’t chain myself
to your bumper if you’ll promise to see
me
tomorrow. Here’s my private phone number.”

As Simon pulled his car to a halt in the
garage, Carole scrib
bled the number on a
scrap of paper from her handbag and
gave
it to him. Simon went with her as far as the elevator.

“Well?” she
said.

“Well?” Simon
echoed.

Carole leaned against the
wall next to the elevator buttons.

“Well, are you going
to go out with me tomorrow, and well,
are you going to
kiss me good night?”

“Keep it up and
you’ll make drill sergeant.”

“Would you rather I
used womanly wiles? I’m just telling you what I want. You don’t have to do
either one.”

Simon’s mind jumped
forward over the next couple of days.
He had no binding
plans.

“I think I’ll do
both,” he said.

He bent down and softly
kissed her parted lips.

“I’ll have to phone
you tomorrow about getting together,” he
told
her.

She was looking into his
eyes with such melting adoration that he felt uncomfortable about having kissed
her. She had
asked for it, but apparently there
was a very susceptible, child
like female just below
that bold and mischievous surface. The
elevator
doors slid soundlessly open, and Simon shepherded her
gently
into the mahogany and brass of the cabin.

“Why aren’t you
riding up too?” she asked.

“I didn’t park the
car very tidily,” he said.

She seemed to come back to
earth suddenly.

“You’re not going
back to that bar, are you?”

“I’d much rather go
to bed,” he said deviously. “Thanks for a
wonderful
evening.”

She felt an urge to reach
for his hand and keep him there, to
protect him from
the danger she sensed was waiting for him out in the night, but he had stepped
back from the elevator, and the
doors moved between them.
She was alone in a costly cocoon, as
she had been during
so much of her life, and then she was rising
smoothly
by virtue of some unseen mechanism to a roost high
above
the noise and grime of city streets.

She found her father in the
living-room of the penthouse, re
laxing in purple silk
pajamas and dressing gown as he sipped
a
brandy. His white hair was neatly brushed as always, but his
eyes were weary.

Carole kissed him on the
cheek.

“I’ll bet you’re
waiting up for me. You’re really incorrigible.”

“I don’t like you
going off with strangers,” he said, gently
rather
than critically. “Especially late at night.”

“Simon isn’t a
stranger,” she replied dreamily. “I feel as if I’d
known him
all my life. And if you really don’t trust him, I can
tell you that I gave him all sorts of chances to kidnap me …
hoping he would … but he didn’t.”

Hyram Angelworth smiled and shook his head.
“I’m afraid
you’re the one who’s
incorrigible.”

She became aware that
Richard Hamlin had materialised near the entrance to the adjacent study off the
main room. He was
ostensibly looking through some
papers, but listening as always.
Didn’t he ever sleep? And didn’t it ever occur
to him that she
might like to talk to her
father alone?

She tossed her handbag on
to a sofa and kicked off her shoes,
trying not to let
her irritation get the better of her.

“We did have a sort
of adventure, though.” She flopped into
a chair and pointed her
toes and stretched her legs. “In my ef
forts
to get myself kidnapped I lured Simon into a sleasy bar-
Sammy’s Booze & Billiards, to be
precise.”

An expression of intense pain developed on her
father’s face as she recited the full name of Sammy’s establishment, which
only served to encourage her to continue with
greater relish.

“Simon wasn’t keen to
go in, but I insisted, and there were
these very
underworld-looking characters playing pool, and Si
mon
recognised one of them and called him by name. He didn’t remember until too
late that this guy named Brad Ryner was a
detective,
and so he was probably pretending to be a crook to
collect
information for the police. Ryner claimed his name was
Joe
and he’d never seen Simon before. He really acted nasty.
Simon’s worried to death he may have gotten this detective
in
trouble. Isn’t that thrilling?”

“It’s troubling,”
Angelworth growled. “It’s bad enough to
know
there are so many crooks and parasites in the world with
out having to worry that my own daughter’s out rubbing
elbows
with them. I can’t say I think much of your friend
for taking you
to a place like that.”

“I needled him into it. I’ve been there a
couple of times be
fore, with the gang, and
I wanted to see how he’d take it.”

“And what about this
man Templar? We don’t know a thing
about him. Why
should he recognise a plainclothes policeman?”

Carole stood up, suddenly
wanting to end the conversation as
soon as she could.

“Well, at least he recognised the
policeman instead of the
crooks—if they were
crooks.” She touched him on the shoulder.
“It’s all over anyway, Daddy. I’m really tired, and you must be
too. Good night.”

He was still brooding in his chair as she went
down the hall
to her bedroom, and she
wondered if Richard Hamlin would be commenting on her escapade after she had
left.

CHAPTER 3

Two alternatives duelled
in Simon Templar’s mind: One claimed
that the best thing
he could do for Brad Ryner was to stay as
far
away from him as possible, hoping that Ryner’s playmates would forget the whole
episode if they were not reminded of it;
the other rebutted that
having inadvertently placed Ryner in
danger,
the Saint owed it to him to get back in touch with him
and help him in any way possible.

When logic was deadlocked,
the Saint was inclined to let his
instincts take
over. He literally found himself driving towards Sammy’s Booze & Billiards
before his rational mind had reached
a conclusion.

Simon made no effort to
resist the decision of his reflexes. His mind went on to process future
possibilities. If Ryner was still at
the pool table with
his companions them the Saint would ignore
them
and try to follow Ryner when he left the bar. If the three
men had left, he would try to trace one or more of them.

He had faultlessly
memorised the route, in reverse, on the
way
back to the New Sylvania, and retracing it this time was no
problem.

The neighbourhood of Sammy’s bar was a
hodgepodge of
shabby and squalid in the
creeping process of becoming one
hundred
per cent squalid. Sammy’s was at the approximate half
way point of decay, and the Saint had to slow down
sharply in
order to avoid a couple
of unsteady drunks who staggered into
the
road just ahead of him as he came within a block of the
bar.

It occurred to him later
that if those two alcohol-laden human
tankers had not
pitched and rolled across his path at just that
time,
Brad Ryner might have died. Because it was when Simon
jammed
on the brakes that the edge of his field of vision picked
up a trace
of movement in an alley to his right. It might have
been a cat. It might have been some nocturnal stroller taking a
short cut home. It might have been a newspaper
blown by the
wind that was whipping
a few drops of rain against the windows
of his car.

But the Saint was so keyed
up and watchful that he could not
ignore even such
an undefined flash of motion in a dark place near Sammy’s bar. He pulled
immediately over to the kerb un
der a no-parking sign
about fifty feet beyond. He was out of the car in an instant, sprinting back
along the sidewalk to the mouth
of the alley. There he
stopped short, drizzle sprinkling his face and wilting his clothes, and
listened. There was an ominous
economy in what he heard:
feet scuffing on pavement, muffled
thumps, a sudden
stifled expulsion of cries …

The Saint judged the
distance of the sounds down the alley,
then
catapulted into action. He knew that surprise would favour
him for only a few seconds, but those few seconds were all he
needed. His long legs carried him down the alley so fast that he just
had time to take in the rudiments of the shadowy scene before he made physical
contact with it: one man holding another
while
a third punched and kicked him.

The big man who was doing
the beating turned with fist raised
as the Saint bore
down on him like some wild spectre set free
by
the night wind. The man’s flabbergasted defense would have
had some effect against a less swift and co-ordinated blitzkrieg
than the Saint’s, because this was the very big brawny man
from
the pool room, lowering in the semidarkness with a
trace of
street-light touching the raindrops
on his sallow face, sparking a
glint of squinting eyes
and clenched teeth.

In spite of his size, he
was caught off balance and the Saint
hit him with
approximately the effect of a locomotive striking a straw scarecrow. The man
who had been a moment before slam
ming knuckles and
shoe-leather into his defenseless victim did
not exactly fly apart
in several pieces, but he did the next thing
to
it. He was smashed back against the brick wall of the building
forming one side of the alley, and fell away from
it with the
limp awkward grace of a
dropped rag doll.